News

Down to business

Upbeat James McCartan is preparing for another stern test from Kerry today

James McCartan appreciates that agonising defeats, Pyrrhic victories and seismic shocks only register as footnotes among the morass of games played every summer. Still, he inhales a deep gulp of breath when acknowledging that the biggest shock in football qualifier history was only inches away from becoming a big story last June when Down’s Conor Laverty deflected the ball off his own goal line deep in stoppage time against Clare.

Down’s panel were stretched with injuries but they only scored twice in the last 25 minutes while Clare kicked four successive scores down the home straight. Clare had won just one championship match in five years. Down had been in the previous year’s All-Ireland final. Down only won by one point and it would have been easy to paint by numbers the potential portrait of the apocalypse. Even now, the ramifications of defeat do not bear thinking about for McCartan.